a path cut through the black
by TNOandXadric
Summary: She's lost her grip on the Plan, but she didn't realize how much would peel away with it. Vivienne reflects on a life measured out by inches. Legally Blonde/Company/real-world!Wonderland crossover.
1. prologue

This is how it begins:

Pour, drink. Allow muscle memory to take control. Empty the glass too quickly.

Pour again. Drink until the truth snaps into focus.

Keep drinking, because clarity has claws.

Breathe in and hold and breath out.

Examine the steps leading to this moment. Let the memories tessellate and tangle.


	2. one

_I see the cracks—_

_I weigh all the facts—_

_I try to pull myself out but it's steep—_

_and I'm falling._

•

Two weeks into summer vacation after her third year at Groton, the novelty of her return dissipated. Mother and Larry left at seven o'clock, to be back late.

It was easier to finish the day's allotment of summer homework without the interruption of their presence. She toyed with the idea of an early start on tomorrow's work, but contrary to what she told people at school, her endurance wasn't endless. If she forced herself to read another page of Raskolnikov's manufactured narcissism, she would scream.

Too restless to sit still, she wandered from window to window, monitoring the sky as it began to darken in the east. She made the circuit twice before acknowledging that, yes, the twitchy feeling resting above her diaphragm was boredom.

One of the kitchen cabinets always opened a few inches on its own, the fault of cantankerous hinges, and for some time she leaned on the counter and pushed it closed and closed and closed, in time with the clock tick over the refrigerator. When she tired of the repetition, she helped it swing further open instead to retrieve a glass.

She drank water in minuscule sips, sitting on the counter and drumming her heels against the drawers below so they rumbled hollowly. The twilight deepened to the halfway place during which it was dark but still too bright for turning lights on, and the window drew her in again. She traced the sill with her finger, coming up dusty, and resisted the urge to touch the glass itself. She wasn't in the mood for scrubbing away her own fingerprints.

A quarter to nine, and she made a thorough exploration of the kitchen. Every cabinet, every drawer, she opened and then closed again. She dragged her fingers along the sides of the counters and rearranged the contents of the refrigerator. The freezer was, of course, the next logical step.

Not-quite-full bottles of vodka lined the left side, and she took the nearest one out and set it on the counter while the freezer door swung shut. The glass clinked pleasantly beneath her nails, and the cap froze her fingers to the point of pain when she removed it. She focused on the lingering chill to distract herself from what she was actually _doing_ while she filled the bottom half-inch of her empty glass.

She lifted the glass to the remaining light through the window and swirled it with a gentle roll of her wrist, watching the way the liquid spun and wondering what Mother saw in it. It looked about as interesting as water.

Vivienne closed her eyes so she didn't have to look at it when she raised the cold glass to her lips and embraced the inevitable.

•

Mother knew within a week, and while they had never been exactly _close _they had also never fought before. She still struggles to remember details, but it was all a boiling, tumultuous blur of squandered lives and subjective values and words that expressed themselves like Pascal's Pyramid. Self-immolation is often described as an inescapable, ever-tightening spiral; for once, Vivienne agrees with linguistic convention.

It happened like some farcical trial, the first time: Mother as judge and jury and executioner, the nearly empty bottle of vodka standing in for exhibit A. There was no discovery, no opportunity to find an opposing counsel. "I am," Vivienne said, "_your _daughter," and studied the way it made Mother's mouth twist in bitter self-recrimination and her fingers go white around the bottle. "I have an essay to finish."

The vodka disappeared from the freezer after that.

•

She never meant to pick up this way of talking, but it came by nature and nurture and whatever the argument she picks now for explaining why one holds a larger claim over the other, she was no more able to withstand both than anyone else. So it became _that is _I, _miss _and turning detachment into pride: she was too good for the lethargy and thoughtless shittiness humankind built its foundations on.

When Vivienne was younger and did not understand the relentless unpleasantries of the real world, she loved to listen to stories of heroes who triumphed over an ill-defined Bad after sufficiently hard work. Years later, she stood straight in front of the counter, a glass of Larry's scotch in one hand and _Crime and Punishment_ propped open with the other. Seen through the alcohol's lens, it was easier to get through and flowed just well enough for her to tear it apart with black pen in the margins, little inked condemnations of Raskolnikov's foolish self-aggrandizing and Petrovich's underhanded mind-games. She would tone it down for her essay, enough for a perfect grade, but for that moment, she understood at last her mother's need to vent.

In an hour, her father would arrive to pick her up for the weekend. His second wife would call her _pumpkin_ and have a plate of cookies waiting in the kitchen, would apologize when she asked to be called by her _name_. Emily was soft and kind and wore her terms of endearment like a second skin, as if afraid that calling a thing by its proper name would give it power over her rather than the traditionally-accepted opposite.

Father kept six-packs of beer in the fridge and Emily had her white wine, neither of which Vivienne was fond of. She finished her glass and poured another; the bottle was half empty and would be easy to bring with her. Mother found reasons for absence whenever Father made an appearance, and Larry was meeting with a client. It would mean they knew she found the supply in Larry's study, but it wasn't so long before her return to Groton would force her to find a new source regardless.

•

And it was beautiful—it was so fucking beautiful, those dark little mind-games she played after picking her poison. Vivienne never danced until she learnt to do it with toxins and glass and an eye for the depraved fractals in human nature where before there was only matte darkness.

Six months is the appropriate time for a wild, thoughtless affair: not quite a spring fling and not quite a summer romance. It ended, as it must, with mementos in cardboard boxes flung into dumpsters. Vivienne said goodbye, not to drunkenness—she is her mother's daughter and she would not be so sloppy—but to intoxication. The last drops of scotch evaporated from her tongue in the chill of an early-January morning.

•

She still doesn't know how Father found out, whether it was by deduction or observation or if Mother realized that she was using her court-mandated visits to the Kensington side to procure the alcohol that was increasingly hard to find at home and shelved her pride at last. During the six-year-long disintegration of her parents' marriage, Father was always the one who shouted, but there were no screaming matches this time, only a Look that has never entirely faded from the insides of her eyelids and, "You're just like your _mother_."

Emily sent her home that day with a bag of oatmeal raisin cookies. Vivienne still isn't sure what happened to them, exactly, except that they sat untouched for far too long on her desk, next to the neatly folded print-out of this semester's grade report with its 3.85 GPA, her lowest since grade school. It sat there for the duration of winter break; fresh black ink on crisp paper should not have been able to sink claws into her skull with such efficiency.

•

Vivienne is not given to sitting on floors, but she finds herself doing so now. She tilts her head back until it rests against the wall with nowhere further to go and closes her eyes. When she opens them again, nothing has changed except the glass becoming lukewarm in her hand.

Someone knocks. She waits for them to go away, but instead they knock again, more insistently. Scowling, she gathers her feet beneath her and slides upright, hesitating, checking, before she pushes away from the wall. She hasn't lost her tolerance in the years since her last drink, she notes with a sort of dark amusement before going to answer the door.

It's Warner, with a cardboard box. Vivienne raises an eyebrow at him.

"I tried to call," he says uncertainly. "But your phone was off. I just… you never came by to pick up the books you left at my place." He offers her a brave attempt at a smile, which withers away when she doesn't return it. "So I figured I'd save you a trip."

Vivienne steps back to let him in, and she doesn't miss the way his eyes go straight to the glass in her hand, the inch or so of scotch still there. "Just leave them on the counter," she says sharply. _Don't stare. Don't you dare comment_.

He sets the box down with greater care than she would have expected from him, although the weight of it still makes an impressive thud when he lets go of it. Light reading is not something that happens to _her_, after all. She waits, still holding the door open, for him to leave. "Is everything okay, Vivienne?" he asks.

"Shocking as it may seem to _you_," she says, moving forward now with carefully precise steps, "I'm not going to fall apart without you around to torment." Her smile feels poisonous; she's forgotten how she enjoys the sensation.

Warner frowns. "That's not what I meant and you know it," he says.

She doesn't bother responding, just steps around him to open the box, hoping he'll take the hint even though that's never been his strong suit. "It's not just me, you know," he says after a moment. "It's the whole—mess—with the Wyndham trial. I've hardly seen you since then."

"Are you really _that_ pathetic?'" She swivels around to look at him, exasperated. "Warner, whatever we had, it's _over_. You should know that. Or have you forgotten that you asked Elle to marry you a matter of days after I dumped you?"

His eyes flash, but he holds his ground. "That doesn't mean I don't still care about you," he snaps. "And it isn't _hard _to notice when something's up with you. You work so hard to be _perfect_ all the time that it's pretty damn obvious when you stop." His gaze slides back to the glass, and she feels her grip tighten against her will.

"Thank you for returning my books," she says stiffly. "You can leave now."

He deflates like a punctured tire. "I'm not any good at this, okay?" he says. "But—whatever's going on. It's not healthy." He retreats to the door. "I'm here for you, if you need it. So's our study group. We're all worried about you. And Elle, too. Just… know that, okay?"

She stares hard at the other wall until she hears the door shut behind him.

* * *

**AN: **Lyrics at the top are from "Avalanche", which in turn is from _Tales from the Bad Years_.


	3. two

_But it was not wrong that when he dropped to one knee,_

_she sort of laughed instead of cried._

_And when she saw he had a ring,_

_she couldn't breathe and ran outside._

_It was just one more deal in a game they'd played a few times_.

_•_

The ring burned hotter than a live coal when Vivienne eased it off her finger, not for the first time but certainly for the last. She had hoped to do this clinically, a quick incision and they could both get on with their lives, but she could hear her blood thudding behind her ears and the sticky sensation in her lungs that preceded panic. Her penance, she decided, for letting it get this far in the first place even though she ought to have known better.

"Warner," she called after him, her voice echoing in the empty hall.

She'd always liked his smile; it was like watching him peel away his swaggering mask to expose a different, nicer, person underneath. The kind of person who wouldn't _sneer _at a woman who'd been sexually assaulted mere minutes previously. Vivienne took a deep breath that seared down her throat and held out the ring, and Warner turned a nasty, greyish color.

"Babe, what—"

"I should never have accepted this at all," Vivienne said quietly. "I don't want this, not right now, not with you or anyone else, maybe not ever. I'm sorry for making you think I did."

He stood there with his face crumpled, and Vivienne carefully picked up his hand and put the ring in it, made sure it was secure in his fist before she lets go. "But… we had all these…"

"Plans, yes," Vivienne said. She wondered when exactly she became so fucking _sick _of the word, or if it wasn't a singular point at all but a gradual process that crept up on her over the years. "They were great plans, too. But I'm tired of living in the future, Warner, and I don't think I want to live in the present with you. So." She managed a small smile, which he didn't return. "It was nice, while it lasted."

She didn't look back. Now, she wonders what she would have seen if she had.

•

They had dated, back at Groton, not for long, only a few months and an awkward kiss or two. He'd struck her as vaguely purposeless at the time, and she had seen no reason to keep in touch. Seeing him again at Harvard was not on her mental checklist of things to expect. Warner Huntington (the _third_, as he'd always insisted) held himself differently than she remembered, with a swagger that bespoke confidence tending, perhaps, to arrogance and a little half-smile that was too charming to be anything but calculated.

"Hey, Kensington," he said, the first time they were together long enough for recognition to strike them both. "You remember that crappy volcano we had a few years ago?" He turned on the smile again, and for all that she knew it was only artifice, it still sent a jolt to the base of her spine and made her palms tingle. "Wanna do some more chemistry together?"

It had been nearly two and a half years since Vivienne was last rendered speechless. She stared at him while he raised his eyebrows and leaned against the archway they were passing through, waiting. "Dinner," she said at last, when she was certain that he _had _said something so ridiculous and, to all appearances, meant it. "That Italian restaurant down the block, tomorrow at six. No wine."

His smile was actually genuine, this time. "Sounds great," he said, straightening up again.

She took in a quick breath to recenter herself after this unexpected upheaval and managed to make her own smile something more than simply polite. "Your treat."

•

Vivienne was so goddamn _excited_ about her name on that list, a soaring feeling that was the opposite of panic yet oddly similar in the way her heart slammed against her ribcage and the lightness in her mind that kept her from seeing anything but _Vivienne Kensington _and _Warner Huntington III _in neat block letters. Warner evidently felt that the internship was not perfect enough on his own, because he ruined the moment by dropping to one knee.

She retained the presence of mind to think that _of course_ he would do it like this, trapping her in public and making a grand show of it, but then he pulled out the ring and she recoiled.

She should have said—she _wanted _to say, "No, this is too fast," and "How can you do this when you know about my mother?" and "I don't _like _you this much," but when she opened her mouth, what came out was a weak, "Warner… it's absolutely stunning." He smiled his stupid, _stupid _smile, the sweet, real one that was always—almost always impossible not to return. Her lungs closed up and even with her peripherals fading to dark brown, she could feel everyone else just standing and _staring_ at her expectantly.

"Marry me?" he'd asked, and she'd wanted to turn and run until there was nobody _looking_.

"Stop _staring!_" she'd wanted to scream at them and _especially_ at Elle, with her pinched expression like someone had just kneed her in the gut and those wide blue eyes jumping from Vivienne to the ring and back again.

But they continued to look and Vivienne couldn't run because she was dizzy enough as it was, so she forced her throat to unlock and said, "Yes."

•

Warner offered to carry her books for her almost every day of their final year at Groton, and she let him eat lunch with her sometimes. That, really, was the extent of their relationship. At first he tried to say what would impress her, but Vivienne waited in silence until he said something of substance; it was some surprisingly insightful comment on the conflict in Israel, she thinks, although she's forgotten the specifics since then. At any rate, it was enough of a foundation for the first real conversation they had, and in later ones they progressed to more personal details: his older, better brother, her thrice-married Mother, their shared love of Orwell.

"I really like you," he said one afternoon, sometime in early May after their last class had got out.

"I hadn't noticed," she'd replied dryly, and his hand had twitched in hers.

"Well, I do, actually," he said. She rolled her eyes.

"Are you going to do anything about it?" she asked.

She watched while he deliberated for a while, sorting through the possibilities in her head. When he ducked his head and said, "D'you want to kiss?" she felt the familiar satisfaction of having guessed correctly.

His lips were unpleasantly loose and _wet _against hers, but there was something of a thrill in it anyway, standing with their fingers still entwined and making their first foray into something that, at the time, felt incredibly Adult and Mature. That she broke up with him a couple weeks later before leaving for her summer internship at Larry's law firm mattered only a little.

•

This afternoon, on the day following the conclusion of the Wyndham trial, Elle caught up with her on the way out of Legislation and Regulation. Vivienne shortened her strides so Elle could fall comfortably into step behind her, and it was for this reason that she stumbled just slightly, not Elle's offhanded, "So you dumped Warner."

"You heard?" Vivienne frowned. Elle was her usual cheerfully energetic and very _pink_ self, and her demeanor gave no hint as to motive.

"He proposed to me after the verdict," Elle said.

She was surprised by how little this news hurt; she was a little insulted, maybe, or possibly just irritated. "Oh."

"I said no, of course," Elle said with an undignified snort. "I mean, _seriously_? And besides I've been over him for a while. But, anyway, are you okay?"

The question caught her off guard, enough that she stopped walking. "What?"

Elle tossed her hair over her shoulder and pinned her in place with an uncomfortably knowing look. "Well, you threw away every law student's dream internship _and _dumped your fiancé in the same week. Plus you looked really out of it at dinner last night. So… you okay?"

"I'm fine," Vivienne had said. "Why are you asking?"

Elle looked blank. "Why wouldn't I?"

"It's not as if we're friends."

"Maybe not," Elle said, frowning, "but you risked your _career_ for me and anyone with a braincell can see how huge that is to you. That's a solid reason for friendship if I ever heard one."

"That had nothing to do with friendship," Vivienne told her firmly. "It was just the right thing to do."

"All the more reason!" Elle said. She crossed her arms, her eyes gleaming with determination. "All I'm saying is that I'm really really grateful that you talked me off the ledge, so to speak, and I _totally_ overestimated how much of a bitch you are. So, yeah, I care whether you're okay. And no, 'I'm fine' isn't going to cut it, because I'm not _stupid_. If you were fine you wouldn't be surprised that I asked in the first place."

"I'm not sure that follows," Vivienne said flatly, and she started walking again. Elle huffed and hurried after her.

"People who are fine don't get—get _offended_ when somebody asks how they're doing," Elle said.

Vivienne took great care to unclench her jaw before she responded. "I'm not offended."

Elle snorted again. "Yeah. _Right_. If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. Just say so."

"There's nothing to talk about," Vivienne snapped. She was surprised as Elle by how much her voice sounded like a snarl. "I didn't want to marry Warner in the first place and I'm not willing to sacrifice my integrity for my career. You of all people should understand that! I'm not _upset!_"

"You sound upset," Elle said softly.

Vivienne dug her fingernails into the flesh around her elbows through her sweater, half-convinced she was about to fly apart like an overfilled ballon. Oddly, it's her horror at the moisture gathering in her eyes that she remembers most clearly, now—they were painfully hot and itched at her tear ducts and they induced or were induced by an awful, shaky feeling through her entire body. She gulped air and let old habits take over to force her shoulders to uncurl and her back to straighten again, tilted her head so the accumulated liquid in her eyes didn't fall.

"It's okay, you know," Elle said.

Vivienne didn't—couldn't—answer; she fled to the bus stop as fast as the remaining shreds of her self-respect would allow.

But _something_ happened to her, then, and whether it was Elle specifically who did it or simply a matter of collapsing under the weight of her own inadequacies, Vivienne doesn't know. She got off at the next stop and wandered until she found her oldest friend and the only thing that could blur away the edges and rid her of the need to cry; the walk home was not enough to talk herself out of this fall.

She refills her glass for a third time.

* * *

**AN: **Lyrics at the top are "Not Her Way," from _Tales from the Bad Years_.


	4. three

_You say goodbye, but do you really know it's over?_

_You say goodbye, but do you comprehend it?_

_You go along,_

_thinking that things like this never change. _

_But that can also change._

•

She had a friend, once. It came about by chance and enforced proximity, nothing more; they were roommates for two years at Brown, first by computerized selection in Morriss and then for convenience in Caswell. Madeline Knight was her name; Vivienne hasn't heard from her since and, for that matter, doesn't think of her often, either. They parted on good terms, so there's no _point _in letting it linger.

There are, for the second time today, tears prickling her eyelids. Vivienne stalks over to the nearest window and scowls at the cars passing below, drink in hand. Another mouthful, and another, and the moment passes and her eyes are dry again, although it still hurts to breathe through the tightness in her chest that always takes longer to dissipate.

Vivienne _does_ wonder, sometimes, what happened to her.

•

Either Madeline outright lied on her new student housing questionnaire, or the system that paired incoming students with compatible habits together had a severe and undiscovered flaw. That was and still is the only explanation Vivienne can come up with to explain how she, with her regimented sleep schedule and careful, habitual precision could possibly be deemed compatible with someone as tirelessly exuberant as Madeline. For the better part of a year, she was almost convinced that Madeline simply didn't need to sleep.

Vivienne, on the other hand, _did_, even on weekends, so she was more than a little vexed whenever Madeline waltzed in and out of the room at three in the morning on Fridays; Vivienne's version of "keep it down so your poor roommate can sleep for a proper and healthy number of hours" differed significantly from Madeline's. Usually, she buried her face in her pillow against the harsh fluorescent light that always spilled through the open doorway at _just _the right angle to hit her eyes and waited for Madeline to collapse onto her own bed and be _quiet_ or else leave again with the victim _du jour_. Madeline had tried bringing them home for the night, once or twice, in the beginning, but they always wanted to _talk _and so Vivienne had put her foot down by the end of September.

A few days after spring break, during which Madeline had gone home and Vivienne had stayed and enjoyed a week and a half of _blissful_ quiet, she snapped and grumbled out something along the lines of "Why don't you just sleep in the hall," only to be bolted out of her lingering sleepiness by Madeline landing just shy of her knees and offering the opinion that she ought to go to a party sometime. Any hope that Vivienne had of making it a short conversation were dashed when Madeline reached past her to click on her lamp.

"You know perfectly well that I don't dr—" Vivienne had begun, peeved.

Madeline swatted her upside the shoulder. "Drinking and having fun aren't inextricably linked, you know. I mean you're allowed to leave the room for things other than class and scheming with other poli sci's and pre-laws. It can't be healthy, not having a life outside of your textbooks."

"I happen to likestudying," Vivienne muttered mutinously.

Madeline, however, had refused to leave well enough alone, and made a nuisance of herself and Vivienne, grudgingly, offered that she _did _know what she was missing out on because she _had _dated someone back at Groton, and she had, for a period of six months, experimented with a life not lived according to schedule and found it deficient. At that, Madeline said nothing, just stared with those beautiful blue eyes of hers until Vivienne squirmed and said the first thing that came to mind, which was "Larry used to let me come to the office with him and, after I was old enough to look the part, he'd introduce me as his intern and let me sit in on depositions and hearings and so on."

"And that was how you decided he'd be an acceptable step-father, yes?" Madeline said, smirking.

"Something like that," Vivienne had replied. Madeline let her stop talking after that, told her instead about growing up with a twin sister and three brothers and parents who died too young; Vivienne, who still had a full set of parents and step-versions of both, winced at that, and by then she was so exhausted that her judgement was impaired enough to mumble out a narrative of the divorce and the horrible fights and even more horrible periods of silence that preceded it.

When she woke up in the morning, Madeline had still been there, nestled between Vivienne and the wall and with an arm curled unceremoniously around her waist. It was more comfortable than Vivienne had been willing to admit at the time, albeit much too warm. Madeline made her tea and, in the weeks that followed, there seemed to be little point in going back to the polite acquaintanceship they'd had before.

•

Vivienne never did figure out how to define the _whatever it was _between her and Madeline. Mostly, they were friends, although there were times when they skirted precipitously close to the edge of anything even remotely platonic and Vivienne has, after all, always strived for precision in language as in everything else. Regardless of labels, it was remarkable, how easily Madeline could make her forget about rigid adherence to the Plan when they talked. Or touched, when that happened.

It was the hand-wringing she noticed first—not right away, but an awareness of it grew in the month or so leading up to winter break of their sophomore year. Madeline wrote it off as merely cold hands, which was at least plausible, so Vivienne let the matter lie even though she could tell that Madeline was worried. Better, she thought, to wait until Madeline was prepared to talk about it. Another few months passed without a word on the subject, though, and then Madeline abruptly resigned from the track team and stopped going out on weekends and started taking elevators, something she had been almost vehemently opposed to before.

After that last, Vivienne gave her another week before deciding she'd lost her patience. "Madeline, what is going on?" she demanded. Madeline winced and looked away; Vivienne remembers distinctly staring at what little she could still see of Madeline's face and the gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"I just haven't been feeling well, lately," Madeline had muttered. "And." She stopped, twisting her hands together in a way that had to hurt. Prompting only made her move from her desk to her bed and keep resolutely looking anywhere but at Vivienne; Vivienne followed her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

"You can tell me," she said. "You can tell me anything."

"I'm transferring to NYU next year," Madeline said at length, and Vivienne felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. It was a struggle not to sound accusatory when she asked why, that time and each subsequent one; Madeline never gave her a straight answer. She felt out of place or she wanted to be closer to home or money was too tight to justify another two years of Brown's tuition, scholarship or no. The evasion managed to hurt even more than the irrational feeling of abandonment. They both _lived _in New York City, for god's sake, so it shouldn't have felt like the permanent estrangement it was.

"At least call me," Vivienne said, in desperation, at the end of the year when Madeline's sister, Alice, showed up to help her pack for the return trip.

"Of course," Madeline said, and hugged her goodbye.

She didn't.

Vivienne could have called _her_, of course; even after three years she has the number memorized. But she'd _seen_ what happened to the people Madeline got bored of, the ones that she strung along for a week or two and then never spoke to again. Those that kept trying to contact her were systematically ignored; Vivienne herself had run interference on Madeline's behalf on occasion.

She did try calling, once, towards the end of July. The call went to voicemail, and Vivienne listened to the robotic voice telling her to leave a message and thought that _of course_ Madeline wouldn't bother personalizing it at all; she'd be too busy meeting new people to worry about the old ones. Vivienne hung up after the tone.

•

They kissed. Only once. Madeline dragged her to some coffee shop or another to listen to scruffy aspiring musicians who, in their search for originality, had managed to write songs that all sounded more or less identical, right down to key. Madeline enjoyed herself immensely; Vivienne had nursed an ice tea and composed the third draft of her essay on inequality in the American democracy in her head. When they got back, Madeline had sprawled on Vivienne's bed and demanded to know whether she'd enjoyed herself, teased her mercilessly when she answered with the truth ("no, not at all"), and then refused to move.

"We could always _share_," Madeline said, grinning. "You do have empirical evidence that the bed won't be too small if we cuddle, after all."

"I don't cuddle," Vivienne had said, folding her arms, which only made Madeline smirk and shift into a more comfortable position, her arms crossed behind her head. "Please, Madeline, I'm _tired_." That had worked; Madeline got up and sidled past her, too close—Vivienne still isn't sure whether that part was intentional or just a matter of misjudged distances. At any rate, Vivienne reached out and stopped her, and there was a painfully awkward few seconds during which Madeline raised her eyebrows and Vivienne could think of nothing to stay.

She's almost certain that Madeline leaned in first; it _was_ Madeline who kept it from being anything more than a fleeting moment of mutual attraction between friends. Three and a half years later, Vivienne can still vividly remember tasting mint green on her lips.

After—it couldn't have been more than a minute—Vivienne asked something inane like "What just happened?"

"It's called kissing," Madeline said dryly. "I'd have thought you'd know about it from that boy in boarding school." Vivienne had stepped away and glared at her until she relented and shrugged. "Does it matter?"

She hadn't known if it did, to tell the truth. "I don't feel any different," she said. "It was nice, I suppose."

"Same," Madeline said before retreating to her own bed. "'Night, Vivienne."

She had gone to sleep with her lips still tingling; Madeline said nothing about the kiss the next day, and Vivienne had followed suit, content for the time being to let their relationship stay undefined in the grey area between platonic affection and sexual attraction—somehow romance never really entered her mind.

Vivienne tears herself from the window and curls up in the only comfortable seat in her apartment with her fourth—or possibly fifth?—glass of scotch. She wonders, now, if anything would have been different had she put effort into pursuing something more concrete.

* * *

**AN: **Lyrics from "Not A Love Story", from Tales from the Bad Years.


	5. four

_But when I'm wrong, then I say I'm wrong,_

_and I was wrong about you._

•

Vivienne likes to pretend not to notice the judgements—the little twists of expression that let her read, so clearly, when people write her off in their minds as a frigid and untouchably arrogant bitch—and can she blame them, if that's the image she works so hard to maintain? And truthfully, it doesn't bother her, not always, not even most of the time, but there was something about Elle Woods that made her want to prove the stereotype wrong.

She was so _pink_, and so much the antithesis of what people imagined when they thought of Harvard, but Vivienne knew the statistics better than anyone, so she knew that this woman in her ridiculous clothes and her _signature color _had a shining academic history hiding somewhere under that mass of blonde hair. And she'd responded to Vivienne's mild jab with good humor, so Vivienne had sat a few rows behind her and kept half an eye on the back of her head while she arranged her own space to her liking.

That Elle _hadn't bothered _to do the reading felt startlingly like a personal slight. Even if Professor Callahan hadn't made it clear that he approved of students who were willing to abandon others to get ahead themselves, she would have taken the same satisfaction in saying, "No, I'd throw her out," when he asked and savored the look of shocked betrayal that Elle gave her. Vivienne didn't smirk in return; that would have robbed her of the moral high ground.

It wasn't until after the door slammed shut behind Elle and Professor Callahan returned to his lecture with no more than a warning to come to his classroom prepared or not at all that Vivienne realized she'd been thinking of Madeline the whole time.

•

But Elle was _not _Madeline, not by any stretch of the imagination, and all Vivienne had seen was a passing and superficial resemblance between two pretty extroverts, nothing more. As the weeks passed and Elle continued to make it clear that she had no intention of doing any work _at all_ in _any_ of their classes, it got easier to ignore the occasional turn of phrase that sounded like something Madeline would say or the effortless confidence that Elle projected that felt so similar to Madeline's that it almost hurt.

That Elle was only an outrageous flirt with Warner helped a great deal, as did her bizarre refusal to dress in something other than eye-searing shades of pink—by the night of the Gloria Steinem incident, Vivienne had even managed to stop thinking about how horribly Elle's palette would clash with her old friend's hair.

All of this, of course, meant that she had more and more time to be irritated that Elle was blatantly trying to steal Warner back, and that Warner didn't even have the grace to try not to notice. "You might try a little _subtlety_," she told him sharply one day, after he swiveled in his seat to watch Elle saunter by in a tight and very low-cut top that left little to the imagination.

Elle's work ethic improved tremendously in the second semester, and Vivienne could tell from the way Professor Callahan's TA swelled with pride every time Elle answered a question to Professor Callahan's satisfaction that he had something to do with it. She caught herself wondering idly whether Elle had fucked him or merely promised to, and spent the rest of the day being horrified at how much the thought resembled something Mother would say.

•

Vivienne learned of Elle's would-be departure from Callahan's TA, who at the time was too distraught to think clearly; she sent him to Brooke and intercepted Elle herself. Everything worked out better than she could have hoped, but it so easily might have gone wrong.

Elle might not have listened to her and gone home to California, or Chutney might not have confessed on the stand, or Brooke might not have agreed or any number of variables might have changed, and Vivienne would have gambled everything and lost.

They all had dinner together, the night of the verdict, Elle and Emmett and the rest of the legal team and Brooke. Vivienne sat in silence while the chatter washed over her, and thought about luck and probability and how terrifyingly close she had come to self-destructing instead of finding some manner of success with Elle as a proxy. She had to leave early and spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling and wondering if the liquor store two blocks away from her apartment would still be open.

She notes, with a perverse sort of pride, that she managed to last a whole eighteen hours after the thought first entered her head.

•

She knew Callahan was a bastard; he made that clear on the first day of class. Not once did she suspect him to be the sort that would prey on his own students, if only because he would not be so stupid. Even now, even with the alcohol percolating through her system, when she closes her eyes she can summon up the desolation in Elle's eyes, afterwards, with perfect clarity.

The memory makes her stomach contract into a painful ball that feels like the beginning of the flu, just as it did on the day itself, and her normal eloquence runs dry. She glowers into her glass, waiting for it to condemn her for her weakness.

Perhaps she made up for it in the end, but it will always be less than she could have done, and far too late.

•

Elle got them the alibi they so desperately needed, and for one near-delirious moment, Vivienne believed that everything would turn out all right. Elle, with her sorority promises and client trust and her resolute sincerity, brought Vivienne crashing back to earth less than a minute later. Vivienne still isn't sure what she hated Elle more for, in that moment: that she had _yet again_ squandered an opportunity to impress someone with as much influence as Callahan, or that she _wasn't wrong_.

She could feel the air tightening up around her and the walls felt at once too close and impossibly far away, and Elle, damn her, still didn't seem to grasp why they were so upset with her. "Then I guess we're not very good lawyers," she'd said, like it was simple, like it didn't drive a spike through the last of Vivienne's defenses. Her vision tunneled and she couldn't _breathe_; she was barely aware of swearing as she twisted away, fighting the urge to curl up and hide in a corner somewhere until it passed.

Everything that left Warner's mouth managed to make it worse, "so what" and "pooh bear" and as they were leaving a grumbled tirade that made it clear he didn't see how tangled the morality of the situation was. She focused on breathing instead of hyperventilating—slow, even parcels of air that burned in lungs that had forgotten how to expand. Vivienne counted them and counted her steps, and let the numbers soothe her.

Later, she found Elle and tried to explain herself. "About that alibi," she'd said, and watched as Elle's shoulders tightened and her chin lifted in defiance. "I think it's very—classy, of you, keeping Brooke's confidence like this."

"Oh," Elle said, looking startled. "Thank you, Vivienne."

"It's just—" Vivienne hadn't been able to finish, struck at once and unexpectedly by two addictions she'd thought herself in control of. She wanted to disappear in Madeline's arms for a while or, failing that, she needed a drink. "Is it watertight?" she asked desperately. "Is it—is it the sort of thing that could be proven if she chose to tell us?"

"Oh, yes," Elle said. Some of the tension in Vivienne's chest had eased. "Yeah, it's not something she could lie about. There'd be records of it happening."

"Good," Vivienne had said quietly before leaving Elle in peace. She spent the rest of the evening making weak attempts at conversation with Warner—just enough to keep herself from fleeing to the chilly solace of the nearest bar—while wondering what on earth Brooke had been doing that would have ended up documented but still presented such a problem that she'd risk being convicted for her husband's murder rather than admit to it.

•

She'd been taken aback when Elle invited her to dinner with the rest of the team and Brooke herself after the conclusion of the trial, and even more so when Elle expressed surprise at Vivienne's discomfiture. "You're the reason this all happened," Elle insisted when Vivienne tried to refuse on the grounds that her presence would feel intrusive. "If it weren't for you, I'd be on the other side of the country right now and Brooke might be receiving a sentence she doesn't deserve! Of course you have to come celebrate with us!"

Vivienne had picked at her food and marvelled at how quick Elle was to forgive and, to all appearances, forget how much Vivienne had antagonized her over the past year. It had been manageable—nice, even, sitting with them all and letting them participate for her, until Elle had turned to her and said, "You know, I don't know anything about you, really. You should tell us about yourself."

She floundered on the vast expanse of possible answers before managing to stutter out a collection of facts: born and raised in New York City, parents divorced and both remarried to spouses who suited them much better, a degree in political science from Brown. It was clear that Elle wanted something more personal, so she chose the safest answer, that she'd wanted Harvard Law from the time she was ten. She excused herself before they could ask anymore, feeling lightheaded and off-balance, wondering if this was what it was like to be in shock.

Elle followed her out of the restaurant, looking concerned. "Are you okay?" she asked.

It was another question with no right answer, and Vivienne, panicking, responded by rote. "Of course," she said. "I'm fine."

She flagged down a cab and hunched into the seat while the driver pulled away and left Elle on the sidewalk. When she got home, she dialed the number she still hadn't managed to forget, lost her nerve before the first ring had time to fade, and hung up again.

Madeline wouldn't have answered anyway, she's sure.

* * *

**AN: **Lyrics, obviously, are from _Legally Blonde_.


	6. five

_Someone's screaming "compromise!"_

_But that's not her way._

_That's not what she does._

_She is the sturdy one,_

_the callous one._

_She is,_

_she always was._

•

Vivienne checks the clock and is only mildly surprised to find that it's nearing four in the morning. The scotch is nearly gone; she fills her glass with water instead this time. In the morning, she'll finish it off and go to class. Her sentences will be constructed flawlessly, her vocabulary as precise and carefully enunciated as always. She knows the material, not by heart because she does not believe in rote memorization, but better than any of her peers.

Warner never knew the full extent of her reasons for not drinking, but she wonders whether he'll share anyway, and if they'll look at her the way they did when he asked her to marry him. If they'll _know_. It won't matter if they do; Vivienne will, and perhaps that is enough.

Falling a second time is always easier than falling once. The store she visited last night is not the one nearest her apartment; it will not be such a long walk to escape this time.

When she was younger, Vivienne was never quite sure what to think of her mother. Father never made any secret of the fact that she was an alcoholic; for that matter, neither did Mother. Painful honesty suited them all better than comforting lies and always had.

It wasn't until long after the divorce and long after mother remarried that Vivienne did her own research, both firsthand and from secondary sources, that she realized it was a more complicated problem than simply having no self control. Her own control is exemplary and always has been, and here she sits anyway with an almost-empty bottle at her elbow.

•

The first time Larry introduced her as his intern, Vivienne was thirteen but tall enough to pass for a small sixteen-year-old; Larry's partners knew how old she really was, but made no argument because she wasn't being paid. She filed papers for him and basked in the thrill of what her teachers at the time might have called following her dream.

It was never a dream; Vivienne hasn't dared to place her faith in dreams since long before the divorce. While her classmates passed notes and giggled and made awkward forays into each other's throats in the hallways, Vivienne measured out her future by degrees. Boarding school came first; Trinity was her first choice, Groton her second. She locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed for half an hour after the former wait-listed her—hormones, Vivienne supposes.

There was never any question that Brown would do the same; Vivienne made absolutely certain of that.

Harvard Law is only a stepping stone and always has been, but the nature of the Plan is that every subsequent step is more vital than the last. She cannot and _will_ not slip now.

Always, _always_ the things that interfered with her timetable lingered only until she removed them. She saw no reasons to let distractions last and, after Madeline, she worked at it until the excisions became reflexive. Mother doesn't like it and never has, but Mother spent a lifetime perfecting the art of self-sabotage and Vivienne would rather learn from her example than her council.

She sets the glass down much too hard; the noise cascades up her arm. Vivienne lifts it to the light to examine the hairline crack along its base.

•

Her phone rings some time after the alcohol has begun to ebb noticeably.

Vivienne closes her eyes; she doesn't have to look to know who it will be. There is _one person_ who would think to call at such an hour. She traces the crack in the bottom of the glass with her fingernail and counts the rings, then waits for the buzz that will signal the end of the voicemail.

She makes herself stand for fifteen minutes more after Madeline finishes. After succumbing to one old addiction tonight, she isn't eager to do the same for another. When she does break, she does so slowly, keeping every movement deliberate.

The message is almost exactly ninety seconds long.

Vivienne puts it on speaker so she can close her eyes and try to forget that she's listening to a tinny recording instead of the real thing.

"Vivienne, I—" Then there is a vacuum of silence. Vivienne begins to wonder if this is all Madeline bothered to say, until, "I didn't expect to… I'm sorry I missed your call. I never meant to—but then—and, Jesus, I don't know what to say. I hope you're okay. Fuck. Better than okay. I hope you're fantastic." The recording of Madeline takes a deep, static-filled breath, and Vivienne feels the first prickles of anger building up inside her ribcage. "You're at Harvard, aren't you? You must be. You couldn't—" a sickly laugh, and Vivienne's stomach twists into an ugly knot "—you couldn't _not _be.

"The thing is—the thing—I don't even know what I'm trying to—I'm sorry, all right? I'm sorry for cutting you out like I did and I'm sorry that I didn't—for not calling—I—"

"Just shut up," Vivienne snarls. She fumbles to delete the message and regrets it instantly because the emptiness that remains is heavier than before. She presses her palms to her eyes to blot some of it out, with minimal success.

Madeline _should _have called. She should have at least had the fucking decency to say goodbye before waltzing off to find a better toy and leaving Vivienne alone with her timeline and textbooks.

It didn't matter, though, not really, because in the end Vivienne would have left her behind; respectable lawyers were not roommates with people who flitted about on stage and sparkled pleasingly for the masses, state representatives did not have best friends with whom they shared intermittent bouts of lust, and presidents definitely did not have loved ones who practically lived for causing scandal. It wasn't done.

She'd thought, once, that the Plan would make her _happy_.

•

She drinks the last of the scotch as the sky lightens. The sun creeps through her bedroom window and, on a normal day, would spill directly onto her face: a more effective alarm clock than any she could buy. Vivienne goes through a mockery of her usual routine, showering, putting on the clothes she laid out yesterday before selecting tomorrow's outfit and setting it aside, eating enough of a breakfast to keep her from becoming hungry until her lunch at half past noon.

As she follows the habitual movements, she replays the voicemail in her head. _I never meant_ and _you couldn't _not _be _and the sharpness of her _t_'s and _k_'s, the way her breath hissed on _sorry_. It's soothing, the exercise of memory and replication. It's good for her to practice recall.

Once she's certain she has it down, she can set it aside and turn her mind to other things, but this, quite unexpectedly, fails. Her thoughts collide and fragment. The schedule that she should have been reviewing gets lost beneath a whirlwind of questions—who will guess and can she last the whole day, what will Warner say and how, _how _will she manage to respond?—and then it all muddles together with Brooke's verdict of not guilty and wondering what will happen to Chutney and the real trouble, she thinks, is that she let herself get hung up on the past instead of looking towards the future as she should have done and now, now she's tangled up in her own net.

She presses her forehead against the door and gulps air. Outside is the hallway, which she will follow until she hits the elevator—she is too out-of-sorts to manage stairs right now—and the street is three stories below. She'll flag down a cab because she's in no state to drive herself today, and when they arrive at Harvard, she'll tip the driver well and exchange meaningless pleasantries before going to class.

The doorknob seems impossibly far away, and when she reaches it she has to talk herself through turning it four times before she can summon up the determination to actually turn it.

* * *

**AN: **Lyrics are, again, "Not Her Way" from _Tales from the Bad Years_.


	7. epilogue

And this is how it ends:

Survive. Go home. Don't call ahead.

Instead, teeter in front of the door and wait for the courage to knock.

Hope that it goes unheard. Cry when it does not.

Say, "I don't know how to stop."

Breathe.


End file.
